Academic Jihad: Subverting with Subterfuge

"If you can't beat 'em, subvert 'em with subterfuge."--RE Bierce

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological.--Cinnamon Stillwell, San Francisco Chronicle: Islam in America’s Public Schools, Education or Indoctrination?

If you're an Islamist, it's time for Plan B.

Islamists aren't dummies: even as al-Qaida is destroyed on the battlefield, those determined to rule the world using Islam as their vehicle, prove to be adaptive adepts.

Those who kill in the name of Allah are stealthily using their enemies' system of freedom against them. In Canada, it's filing charges against best-selling author, Mark Steyn with the Human Rights Tribunal. In the U.K., radical Islamists, allied with the multicultural/PC-for-lunch-bunch is slowly grinding down a thousand years of English law and tradition.

In America, a healthy Islamist grievance industry--headed by CAIR--and gaming the victimization bureaucracy are two prongs of a three-tined fork of attack. What's the third?

That would be the academic jihad: using a mushy multicultural education establishment and the means of academia to further cultural ends.

It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what’s come to be known as the “soft jihad” into America’s classrooms and children in K-12 are the first casualties. Whether it is textbooks, curriculum, classroom exercises, film screenings, speakers or teacher training, public education in America is under assault…

The Chronicle's Stillwell goes on to list a representative sample:

* Last month, students at Friendswood Junior High in Houston were required to attend an “Islamic Awareness” presentation during class time allotted for physical education. The presentation involved two representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization with a record of Islamist statements and terrorism convictions. According to students, they were taught that “there is one God, his name is Allah” and that “Adam, Noah and Jesus are prophets.”

* Earlier this year at Lake Brantley High School in Seminole County, Fla., speakers from the Academy for Learning Islam gave a presentation to students about “cultural diversity” that extended to a detailed discussion of the Quran and Islam. The school neither screened the ALI speakers nor notified parents.

If the speakers in the examples above had been fundamentalist Christians, the ACLU would have set a new land-speed record for filing a lawsuit over separation of church and state.

Stillwell continues:

* As reported by the Cabinet Press, a school project last year at Amherst Middle School transformed “the quaint colonial town of Amherst, N.H., into a Saudi Arabian Bedouin tent community.” Male and female students were segregated, with the girls hosting “hijab and veil stations” and handing out the oppressive head-to-toe black garment known as the abaya to female guests. Meanwhile, the boys hosted food and Arabic dancing stations because, as explained in the article, “the traditions of Saudi Arabia at this time prevent women from participating in these public roles.”

Sadly, there's more, including articles by PowerLine and Stanley Kurtz.

The educational establishment in America has a recent history of indoctrinating students in cultural ideology, and now theology, contrary to parents' wishes. Protesting parents are usually made out to be benighted primitives, standing in the way of their children's education by their enlightened betters.

The National Educational Association, the largest teachers' union, has long been a hotbed of Leftist cant. Apparently, many of their members have joined hands with Islamists, bent on changing the cultural landscape of America through educational indoctrination.

The Islamists couldn't have picked better tools for their subversive mission.

Locally-controlled school boards and parents who are aware are two roadblocks in this process, though the federalization of education continues to strip power away from both.